News

Wellcome gets tough on 'Gold' publishers

Wellcome to publicise a list of publishers who have confirmed that they can meet all Wellcome's requirements where an Article Processing Charge has been paid for 'Gold' open access. Wellcome have discovered that about a third of articles for which an APC has been paid are not fully compliant. Articles should have been deposited in Europe PubMed Central by the publisher and been published under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence. The list of compliant publishers will be available in January 2017.

Consultation document on the second Research Excellence Framework published on 6 December 2016. The proposals seek to build on the first REF conducted in 2014, and to incorporate the principles identified in Lord Stern’s Independent Review of the REF. Responses invited from higher education institutions and other groups and organisations with an interest in the conduct, quality, funding or use of research.

Lord Stern has made recommendations about how to make the REF 'more effective and efficient in identifying and fostering excellence whilst keeping down costs, and reducing the burdens and distortions of the processes employed to these ends'.

His recommendations include returning all research active staff and only permitting outputs to be submitted by the institution where they were 'demonstrably generated' - ie outputs will not be 'portable'.

Analyses of data for 3.3 million papers published from 2007 to 2009 shows a large citation advantage for open access papers. The report by 1science also found that opting for 'Green' open access is 'the most impactful research communication strategy overall and the best strategy in 19 fields out of 22'. 'Gold' open access is the best strategy in biology and biomedical research and very close to Green in clinical medicine.

Green open access involves depositing the author's final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in a repository but which may require an embargo period before the file can be made open access. Gold usually involves paying the publisher an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make the final published version available from the publisher's own website.